Interesting news today from the Eclipse Mylyn project, which it has been proposed should deliberately fragment into six sub-projects for which Mylyn would become an umbrella.

I had the chance to chat last week with Mik Kersten, CEO of Tasktop Technologies, who originally invented the task-focused interface and created Mylyn as part of his PhD.

He explained that the creation of six sub-projects was designed to encourage greater involvement from other vendors in the task-focused interface. Mylyn already has 45 public third-party extensions and the thinking is that other commercial vendors will be more encouraged to participate in their areas of expertise.

The six proposed sub-projects are Tasks, which remains the core project; Context for Java and C++ workspaces; SCM for source code management; Build; Review and Docs. Other commercial vendors that have already agreed to take part in the new sub-projects include Perforce, which is taking a leadership role for SCM; and Cloudsmith, which will be involved in Build.

Each sub-project will be run independently and each will have its own reference implementations, which are:

Tasks – Bugzilla, Trac and Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) implementations
Context – Java, C++
SCM – CVS, Subversion and Git
Build – Hudson and OSLC
Review – Cross-repository support via Tasks and SCM
Docs – WikiText, RichText

In the long-term, however, the thinking is that the independent projects will be able to draw in more support and contributions from the vast ecosystem of software development and lifecycle management vendors ans projects.

Mylyn will remain as an umbrella organization, with Mik Kersten continuing to lead the implementation effort and coordinate the sub-projects. While Mik said he is unaware of a precedent for this kind of fragmentation within Eclipse, there are good examples of coordinated independent sub-projects, such as WTP and EMF, and he will be taking clues from them, as well as the overall Eclipse governance process, on governance.

The change to the Mylyn project is currently a proposal, and there is a 30-day period for feedback before it is due to be implemented.